Hi Don,

Thanks for your message. To supress an alert at database level, please follow these steps:

1. On the Configuration > Alert settings page, go to the left hand navigation.
2. Select and expand SQL Server instance.
3. You would see the list of the databases for this SQL Server instance. Select a database. This will filter the alerts on right hand side which are supported at the database level.
4. Now you can change configuration for this particular database.

Please let me know if I am not clear.

Thanks,
Priya

Thanks Priya, being able to suppress an alert at the database level would help. Unfortunately, I am not seeing this option. I do see the option to suppress at the instance level, but not at the database level. What am I missing?

Hi Don,

Thanks a lot for your suggestion. Currently we do support supressing alert for a particular database. You can do it by expanding under a particular alert on right hand side of Alert Settings. Though other ways of supressing alert is not supported. We will definitely try to improve in this area.

Thanks,
Priya

Being new to SQL Monitor I am finding it very difficult to suppress the noise over the alerts that I really want to get. It would be nice to be able to suppress specific alerts without affecting the settings for other alerts of the same type that might occur elseware.

While there are instance level options for alert suppression, I would like to see a finer level of control of reccurring alerts. I would suggest that any alert should be able to be excluded based on any combination of instance, database, application, userid, specific query, time of day, etc.

Thanks Priya, specifically I am referring to the sql_handle column in the sys.dm_exec_query_stats DMV.

Hi Don .. Thanks a lot for your suggestion. We will review this based on your feedback.

Regards,
Priya

Too many established long running queries show up as as long running query alerts. Should be able to customize the alert thresholds for specific queries based on their query hash available in the sys.dm_exec_query_stats DMV.

Unless I am making the wrong assumption about what you are trying to do here, this is already possible.
If you have an alert for a specific database, click 'configure alert', then chose to
"Customize settings for this level" ... then choose "Disable"

That alert won't appear again for that database.

Hello ... thanks for your feedback. Could you please help us by explaining this in bit more detail.

Allow certain alerts to filter out certain dbs.

Thanks .. yes it makes sense. You mentioned maintenance window .. SQL Monitor does support maintenance window where you can stop alerting completely during maintenance . This can be done via Configuration > Monitored servers page.

But having said that, it does not support stopping a particular alert during maintenance window. So would be nice to know if the current implementation of maintenance window is enough or would be like this feature to be extended to support per alert maintenance window. Also, in what scenario would you like to be alerted about some alert in maintenance window and not about others.

@Priya Sorry for not rpelying sooner but we just now got our license for SQL Monitor and so its been off line for several weeks (It was the trial copy I was using when I posted the eblow).

I did find the path (after reading your post) on how to configure the BACKUP DB Alert for a specific database.

That said there are still way too many constraints on the Alerts. Another good example is TIME Exceptions where you don't want an alert triggered if it occurs at or within a specific time. THere are shceduled time when our server is unavaiable (Maintenance) and all the triggers that woudl be raised when a DB is not respsonsive are then triggered because of this and that result in a lot of false positives if we choose to leave those alerts enabled.

Make sense?

Thanks for your feedback Brett.

Allow us to configure the "Job duration unusual" alert to exclude in the same manner as the "Long-running query" alert

Thanks for the suggestion. You are currently able to exclude, for example, a DB from triggering a Backup Overdue alert (Configuration > Alert settings then select Machine, Server or DB in LH tree and select Configure Alerts) , but improving and extending this configurability as you suggest would be useful. We'll post back when we have any updates...

Hello .. Thanks for your feedback. It is possible though I guess it is not that easily discoverable. You can do it by expanding the database list under alert name in the right hand pane.

Looks to me like you can only customize the alerts at the server (and perhaps instance level too). It doesn't work at the database level. So I can't skip certain alerts where it makes sense such as log backup frequency by database. For most OLTP things I'm happy with the default of 15 minutes between log backups. But there are times 2 or 3 hours is acceptable.

Hello .. Thanks for your detailed feedback. SQL Monitor does support excluding or including particular database. But I would assume that it is not that discoverable. You can do it by expanding the database list under alert name in the right hand pane. Is this sufficient or are you looking for something else?

I just got a look at some more alerts and found outthat some do have more choices then I realized. When I saw that the Backup Alert had no way to specify what DB's to include/exclude it seemed as if the alerts in General were lacking configuration choices. That said hey still need expansion or enhancing. For example the Long Running Query. While the current config options let you exclude items using name matching (regular Expressions) that is fine if all the items to exclude have a name pattern. But what if you want to select specific Objects??? There may be a way to do it with RegExp but I would think that would be a very long expression to list multiple items.

In the area of expanding Alert Configuration options I'd like to suggest the ability to add exclusions. This would depending on the alert provide the user the ability to exclude specific objects, events, time periods or other as appropriate.

For example in the backup alert configuration it would be most beneficial if one could specify what DB's to trigger the alert for. This would allow the exlcuding of one or more DB's which may not need to be backed up.